The impact of vertical wind shear on the hurricane eye tilt at the sea and cloud levels

Tropical cyclones generate powerful wind, torrential rainfall, high waves and damaging storm surge that affect coastal communities. Tracking and predicting cyclones is one of the most important tasks for meteorologists. In this study, we compare the hurricane/typhoon eye locations at the sea level observed by spaceborne Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) and its counterpart at the cloud level by the simultaneous infrared imagery. The vertical eye tilt at these two heights is compared with 850-200hPa vertical wind shear from SHIPS data. Five case studies show that the displacements vary from 10 to 22 km, with tilt direction oriented from downshear-left to downshear to downshear-right. These results are consistent with former studies.